Ladbury PR

Has the time come for Smart Cities to evolve? Say Hello to The Playable City.

After sifting through 93 applications from around the world and much anticipation, the judges for the Playable City Award produced by Watershed, have finally announced the winner. The successful project to receive £30,000 to create a playful urban environment is “Hello Lamp Post!” submitted by London-based PAN Studio in association wth Gyorgyi Galik and Tom Armitage.

Bristol residents will soon have the chance to communicate with their street furniture in an attempt to wake up the city and get its residents talking to the objects around them as well as each other.  The Hello Lamp Post! team took the idea of a ”smart city” one step further by bringing a sense of hospitality and warmth to Bristol’s existing infrastructure.

Residents will be able to text a unique serial number which can be found on lampposts, post boxes and benches usualy used by council staff for maintenance, to wake the object up.  The street furniture will then ask questions back, building an on-going conversation between groups of people that may never have met, even though they share the same post box, bus stop or lamp posts, with a promise of opening up the hidden life of the city and bring its populations closer together.

The work will be unveiled in July when the once invisible objects of the city will come to life, eager to talk. What will you say…?

To find out more, visit www.watershed.co.uk/playablecity